I'm very sorry that I missed this past week.  Starting a STEP course on the Eucharist this week, I don't think I will have the physical energy to keep both commitments.  But, I will resume my bible bursting at the end of May.  Thank you for reading!

The Scorner

Proverbs 22:10

Cast out the scorner, and contention shall go out; yea, strife and reproach shall cease.

It is easy to sit in judgment of others.  We know not the trials and tribulations of their hearts, nor the inner workings of their minds, we only see and hear what is external and use this as our knowledge about our fellow human beings.

If we did this with all of life, would we ever know the sweetness of a pineapple?  Would we ever venture to discover the tender meat of a lobster?  How often have we dismissed someone as inferior because of the way he or she dresses or the place where he or she lives?  So then we deprive ourselves of knowing perhaps the kindest person we’ll ever meet, or the funniest, or the most wise.  Even a bellowing bigot could be a lamb in wolf’s clothing.

Often, people who come off as the most loudly confident can actually be the least self-assured.  They feel themselves surrounded by superiority and bark like an anxious dog.  Some who wish to feel better about themselves will take great effort to knock other people down, their criticisms and contempt laying the other people low so that they, in comparison, may feel themselves lofty and high.  But, it is all just violence and fear.

If we had true peace within ourselves, if we could rest assured upon the knowledge of our own unique value and worth, then we wouldn’t be arrogant.  We would know that we are wonderfully made for good and beautiful purposes and we would not sneer in scorn at others.  We would be able to recognize our own faults and failings, understand our own weaknesses, and this wouldn’t make us afraid or hopeless or full of self-loathing.  Yes, we all need improvement.  And yet, each and every one of us is sacred in the eyes of God, is beloved by Him who made us, who became one of us and died for us – for each and every one of us so that we may fully be our true selves.

Perhaps, we know someone who we think is overly critical and unkind toward others.  Perhaps, we see this person as arrogant and scornful.  We may want to cast this person out of our lives so that we may not have rancor and meanness anymore.  But… are we sure that we are not the arrogant ones?  Are we sure that we are not quick to judge and dismiss others?  Would it not be better to cast arrogance and scorn out of our own hearts first?  To err is human, to forgive divine[i] and shouldn’t it be our goal to be more like God?  That doesn’t mean more like God in looking down in judgment and wrathful punishment – no!  This is a human projection upon God, this is what we see in the Hebrew Testament for an infant people just learning about who God is.  In maturity, the Chosen People come to understand that God is loving and good.  In our own lives, our parents may seem to be bigger and stronger and even, sometimes, a bit scary – but everything that they do for us, ideally, they do out of love.  Can we say that we act in love when we turn up our noses at someone that we judge to be inferior?  Can we say that we act in love when we turn up our noses at someone that we judge to be arrogant?

If we truly know love and there is true love within us, then there is recognition of sanctity in every human being; there is patience, forgiveness, and forbearance in our hearts.  This doesn’t mean that we simply put up with the bad behavior of the scornful, patronizingly tolerant of their negativity.  We should be able to face them as they are and help them to see who they are – not by becoming critical and scornful ourselves, but by being respectful and gentle, kindly seeking the source of their inner rancor.  There will be those who do not want to be helped, but this will not dissuade us from faith in their inner goodness.  Those who want to be left alone, shall be left alone with their own rancor if they don’t try to change.  But they will receive no scorn and no contention from us.  Humble and loving, our reproach will only be the call to recognize their own sanctity and to not be afraid.  Such is the call that we all must answer if we want to truly and fully live.

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[i] Alexander Pope

Bring Forth

Luke 6:43

For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

 

The bas-relief carving is of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus – an artist’s rendering of the classic image of Madonna and Child.  The stone has a lovely, ancient hue, with a slightly rough surface from age and, yet, the age and stone texture take nothing from the fineness of the carving, it’s lines, shape, proportion and detail.  The artist was obviously a master craftsman who could transform the dead, cold flesh of stone into warmly living, human personality.  Woman and child are not only realistically rendered in technique, but also seemingly real in life and breath.  Their faces tell their whole life story.  And, yet…

 

Is this the Holy Mother and the Divine Infant?  Her expression is that of a weary mother, succumbed to putting up with an insolent child – and he is that insolent child, uncaring of how exhausted his willful ways make anyone.  The way they hold their heads, the way their mouths are set, the look about their eyes says it all: this is not a happy family, not the ideal of what anyone should be.  Why would the artist render these expressions upon mother and son?  Why would he choose to evoke such depressing and petty emotions from the personalities of the Holy Virgin and the Christ Child?

 

Why, indeed, unless he didn’t know.  If the artist had never known true love and joy, nor even the deep yearning for true love and joy, how could he evoke this state of being?  If he only understood power as willfulness and patience as weakness, how could he understand the divinity of the infant Jesus or the tender care of his holy mother?  For an artist, as for every human being, there is what the hand executes – and then there is what is executed by the heart.  We may go about our lives doing things with great technique, but if we have not love, and no true understanding of the depth and impact of what we do on our lives and on life as a whole, then we do mere things.  We are empty.  We do not fully live.  We miss the point.  We miss the mark.  We are like trees infected by a hidden blight that can never bear forth rich and wholesome fruit.  We are barren of the true and eternal beauty of life.

 

(Inspired by the random piece of Scripture and by the carving I saw yesterday at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.)

Christina Chase

Thou Shalt Meditate Therein

Joshua 1:8-9

This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.

Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.

 

To some, the Bible is interesting as an example of world literature or morally educational like a mythological fairytale – but it is not sacred.  Even as professed Christians, we can merely read the Bible, our eyes skimming over the surface print words, paying Scripture a kind of civil service with no engaging respect, no investment of self – no reverence for the sacred.  Any treatment of the Bible in these ways – as literature, mythology, or textbook – is an ideal way to get lost.  We will become blind, ridiculous, or wearily dry, unless we truly engage in the Bible by lovingly holding the Bible in its entirety as sacred.  It is not enough to memorize, recite, or enforce the laws therein, we must hold sacred Scripture as sacred, living and breathing the life of God through the forms of human beings, the earthen vessels of human words becoming sacred themselves by being touched by the living water, fire, of the Divine.

 

I’m afraid that I don’t hold the Bible as truly sacred.  I am not eager to delve within its pages, to explore every corner and curve.  I will let the divinely inspired words into my ears or eyes and into my mind, but, too often, I agitate them around in my mind, trying to wring something out of them with my own spin – and I don’t let them into my heart.  It isn’t that I close my heart to them, but rather that my mind keeps them so busy that they don’t have a chance to drip down and touch, with liquid fire, the core of my soul.  I need to not only open my ears and my eyes, but also to open the door of my mind wide so that I may stand aside and let the Word of God fully enter, with Divinity’s own timing, while I receive, in stillness and silence, deeply, deeply into my heart of hearts.  To meditate in wonder rather than in wording, to spread out in the sacred abode in which God and I dwell alone and bask in His voicing… then I am truly nourished by the Word of God, watered and fed and lit up from within, and I grow healthy and strong in the Word, blossoming forth and stepping into biblical reality, naked and unafraid.

 

Thanks be to God.

Christina Chase

Root in Ourselves

Mark 4:16-17

And these are they likewise which are sown on stony ground; who, when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with gladness;

And have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a time: afterward, when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word's sake, immediately they are offended.

 

On the surface of things,

bright lights and sounds flash

and skip about from here to there;

We dance in the nightclub,

compelled by the beat,

poses and pulses in the moment.

On waking,

our bones are heavy, our mindss complain,

and the sun knifes right through us;

We’re befuddled,

our guts heave,

we can’t find our shoes.

 

We walk through the day and life happens around us, life happens to us,

and we let it as we skip about on the surface of things,

never stopping,

never looking up and past our skins,

waiting for the bright flashes, the driving sounds, the entertainment

upon which we bounce around, giddy and greedy, until we are sick,

and only then do we pause and use the stillness and silence as a jumpstart back

into the non-boring world.

Because we won’t be bored…

We won’t let life dig deeply into us where truth might take root.

We won’t be submerged into the depth of stillness and silence

to the place where the core of our being is welled in Mystery.

 

Make me feel good, we say.  Entertain me.  Everything else push away like a blur.

We don’t ponder, don’t choose, don’t dig deep and plant ourselves in the depth of reality,

where we will know rain and cold and heat and pain, growing

roots that will endlessly satisfy our deep, inner longing

for Truth though we feel It will break us – we won’t let Truth break through

and expose our feelings for fools,

the nightclub a game to deaden the soul.

 

Surviving on the surface, on the high points of feeling,

we barren ourselves of life, of full reality.

We react.

But, we don’t live.

Christina Chase

Due Benevolence

1 Corinthians 7:2-3

Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.

Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband.

 

What kind of and how much benevolence is due to your husband?  To your wife?  Or, for that matter, to anyone with whom you have contact today?  Benevolent is God, ever loving and ever giving, and it is in God’s image that we are created.  We love because God first loved us and we are called by Christ Jesus, God Incarnate, to love one another as He loves us: with due benevolence.  All benevolence is due to God and, as every human being is created in the image of God, we are to render benevolence unto everyone in our lives.

Every relationship into which we enter is a sacred relationship, because it is through our relationships that we commune with God.  “Whatever you do for the least of my brethren,” says the Lord, “you do for me.”  This truth can be seen clearly in the relationship of a husband and wife – and it can be distorted most easily in this relationship as well.

For a man is willing to lay down his bodily life for the woman he truly loves (as in the provider and protector of her and her offspring) and a woman is willing to give the entirety of her body to the man she truly loves (as in the developer and nurturer of him and his offspring).  So we are all called to be for one another.  Christ assumed human nature and then laid down his life for us, his blood was shed and his body given up for us, so that we may be redeemed.  Through his love, we are able to be transformed, transcending mere earthly existence, and lifted up into divine life, life that never ends.  Through marriage, too, the man and the woman are able to be transformed, transcending complementary bodily forms, and lifted up into the life of the soul in communion with divine love.  Supporting one another as equals, respectful and responsible in their commitment to one another, their lives are benevolent gifts to the other, willing to sacrifice themselves for the other’s good in everyday life – this is how all the children of God are meant to live with one another, for this is how God so loves us through Christ Jesus.

Yet… marriage can also show us how not to live.  A marriage that is not true marriage, that is not a self-sacrificing gift of love and generosity, can show the selfishness and even cruelty of human beings.  When a man unites with a woman, not for the sake of unity and divine love, but for the sake of his own pleasure, he renders the woman into an object to be used and even abused by him.  “Domestic violence”, as a term, is not powerful enough to truly describe the depravity, the sin, in this relationship.  The desecration of a most sacred bond, belittling and disfiguring an image of God in the person of someone for whom love has been professed, is beyond violent.  It’s an evil that spreads beyond the domicile, infecting the family and the world with selfish cruelty.  And this profanity is not only seen in physical abuse, but also in any abuse that treats a woman or a man as a useful object for one’s own whims.  If no legal crime is ever committed in a marriage, crimes against God’s love can still be perpetrated, when a wife or husband fails to truly love the other and to sacrifice for the other’s good.  Likewise, when any of us looks upon another human being only in terms of usefulness, we profane God’s image.  Whenever we fail to give of ourselves in loving service for another’s good, we fail to live in God’s love.  Whenever we treat our own bodies as mere instruments of pleasure, for ourselves and even for others, we desecrate our true identities and fall into the self-centered life of ignorant belittlement and drunken despair.

Benevolence is what is needed.  A benevolent God allows us to choose freely in order that we may love truly and receive fully the benevolent gifts of love from one another and from Eternal God, now and forever.
                                                                                                Christina Chase

The Desire of Our Soul

Isaiah 26:8-9

Yea, in the way of thy judgments, O LORD, have we waited for thee; the desire of our soul is to thy name, and to the remembrance of thee.

With my soul have I desired thee in the night; yea, with my spirit within me will I seek thee early: for when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.

We are sojourners in the world.  The earth is our home, and yet, it lacks permanence; there is something in the way of fulfillment that is lacking.  We wander and we wonder, insatiated, knowing that there is something more, sensing that there is something missing from the world, something for which our spirits yearn, for which our hearts were made.  It’s a nice life, most of the time, well-stocked with pretty and pleasant things, able to get our hearts racing.  But, though the engines rev and roar, the earthly destinations, gained, are unfulfilling.  Our hearts do not quiet in peaceful, replete rest.  We know that this is not all, this racing and gaining that which is lost inevitably.  In the dust and mold of relentless revolving, all things of the world are lost.  Only that for which our spirits truly thirst, only that for which our hearts deeply hunger, can ever satisfy our human longing.  And, so, we are sojourners in this world of dust and mold and cares for what is able to be grabbed.  All hands must weaken, all fingers must loose, all beautiful faces, textures, smiles, tears, must dissolve into the dust from which they were formed.  But, the soul… the soul alive in every human person, the soul, vibrant and vital, must live, must ever exist and perpetually love… and so love what is perpetual, what is permanent and ever alive, that which is living and breathing through the lovely eyes, the beloved smiles, the breath and tears of every life, that for which our spirits yearn, for which our hearts are made, that something more that is no thing of this world, that something who is a someone, the Infinite, Eternal One, the Holy, Immortal One, Life giving life to us, living through us, our ultimate source and our ultimate destination – our home.

It is a lovely world and it is good to be alive in it when we know that through it lives the fullness of life – the fullness of truth, the fullness of love, the fullness of joy – glimpsed by us when we seek the best and richest fruits imported here by Love.